I have been holding off writing this blog post because I have been hoping that the news was not true. However, more evidence has started to emerge, which seems to suggest that Bullog International has in fact been “harmonised” in soul-destroying Leninist-Maoist ways, once again. In other words, that site has been blocked by the Great Firewall, and netizens in China will need to use proxy devices in order to access Bullogger.com. In Chinese Internet slang, this method of bypassing censorship is euphemistically labelled “climbing the wall”. Everyday in China, many netizens “climb the wall” (Ned Kelly is reminded of the Berlin Wall) to read news from websites such as BBC, CDT and RFA.

I am still holding out hope that the blockage is due to some technical problems, which will be resolved in the near future. So far, more than ten China-based bloggers have published posts about the news. Many posters have also left comments at Luo Yonghao’s personal website complaining about the alleged blockage. So far, neither Mr Luo nor Bullog’s technical manager Huang Bin is available for comment. All blog posts and comments on the latest censorship of Bullogger.com are still accessible. The Chinese search word 牛博国际 (Bullog International) continues to appear at Google.cn and Baidu.com. The only exceptions are the two blog posts published earlier at ProState In Flames’s blog; for some yet unexplained but probably inferable reasons, they have disappeared.

Since Bullogger.com is hosted outside of China, the site is accessible where I am in Western Australia. Some posters complained late yesterday that the site was not accessible in Japan, Canada and the USA. Their complaints made me suspect that there had been some technical issues at the service provider’s end. Bullogger.com has been updated nonstop since its launch on 31 January. The last blog post was published 2009-2-2 21:42 by Song Shinan. The popularity of Ran Yunfei’s blog at the Japan-based portal Sci-de.org seems to suggest that many Chinese netizens are not deterred by the height of the Great Firewall and are quite willing to “climb the wall” (Ned again thinks of the Berlin “Wall of Shame”), for that extra space to express their thoughts.

I think China’s censorship have taken Bullog’s internationalisation personal. They’d rather unblock the BBC’s Chinese website and all of RFA forever, rather than unblocking Bulloger.com. Feud comes from feudal, does it not?

Don’t you worry. Bullog International is operating fine both in and out of China. The site has now been made available in multiple addresses. It has just been re-opened for comments and registration a short while ago. The way these guys operate is nothing short of amazing. I’m not going to publish those new links because you don’t need them to access the site from outside of China. All you need to do is to use the old GFW blocked bullogger.com address and the service provider will redirect you to one of the available sites.

The latest topic of discussions over there is Wen Jiabao and shoes. In pinyin, it is read “wen jiabao he xie” 温家宝和鞋.

By the way, I believe that some of the new url links that’s been distributed has even had proxy build-in. Bullog supporters in China is going to have great fun. Now I’m interested to see what Nanny is going to do next. If Nanny can’t do anything, will Guobao step in?